Not everyone is an unreserved enthusiast for Gehry's projects. He's just too much of a populist, his critics say, lacking the sobriety of, say, Richard Meier or the formality of Renzo Piano. The New Republic's Jed Perl sees in Gehry "an authentic visionary comedian. … His bursting forms, like explosions of laughter given visual shape, are the perfect image for the museum as fun house." Imagine a good run of Saturday Night Live sketches in architectural form. For Hal Foster, some of Gehry's structures, "for all [their] apparent futurism, … are akin to the Statue of Liberty, with a separate skin hung over a hidden armature, and with exterior surfaces that rarely match up with interior spaces. … [Others] resemble the baubles set on corporate plazas in the 1960s and 1970s blown up to architectural scale, and some look as though they could be broken into with a [can]-opener." The Guggenheim, Bilbao, however, looks as if the can-opener has already broken in, though no one I know has found the Statue of Liberty hidden inside.

If you'd like to add Idea of the Day to your Favorites/Bookmarks, right-clickhereand choose "Add to Favorites."